My English is not very much but my friendship for you is very much.
(The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp)
The tiny island group of St Kilda rises solitary out of the North Atlantic. It is forty miles from any other land. It does not exist unless one sails for many hours from Britain, in the insane conviction that a new continent might be reached, still farther across this sea. Far west of the rest of the Outer Hebrides, metaphorically it is the Ultima Thule of the ancients: the land beyond the land we know.
In the absence of anyone else, this is British territory; but it is as far as it is possible to be from every aspect of British society, culture… life. It is an extremity of isolation and bleakness. A storm of hard-living seabirds seem the only inhabitants. The mighty grey cliffs are forbidding—although the hint of green turf around what could be a natural harbour is inviting. Even before the human story is told, St Kilda is drama and intrigue.
Close enough to be intrigued, a yacht appears. The figure at the helm is casually elegant, his bright-white-shorted companion glamorous. There is a deckhand to answer the couple’s curiosity: darker, rougher than they. By look alone, it is clear that he belongs to these seas and stones. And he has a tale to tell, a true story of the humans who made a life in this place but evacuated it in 1930, and left it to the sea again.
This is the edge of the world, and The Edge of the World (1937), and that was just prologue.
* * *
Well, there are more ways than one of getting close to your ancestors. Follow the old road, and as you walk, think of them and of the old England … I feel I’ve only to turn my head, to see them on the road behind me.
(A Canterbury Tale)
Your time was up. But they missed you because of your ridiculous English climate.
(A Matter of Life and Death)
In half a dozen years of the 1940s, and under significant restrictions of theme, movement and resources, a cosmopolitan Englishman and an exiled Hungarian produced half a dozen films that could each feature in a top ten of the finest British films ever made. (Four of them made the British Film Institute’s top fifty in 1999, and all six were in Time Out’s 2011 top thirty.) Over the two decades of their collaboration, the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger emerged as the working out of a love affair with Britain and Britishness.
The Archers, as they branded themselves when they set up as a production company, are more than a British affection. Kurt Weill thought them “away ahead of Hollywood.” An executive at Paramount Studios claimed to use their I Know Where I’m Going! (1945) as a template for the ideal script, according to Powell’s autobiography. In fact, they’ve become even more accessible in recent decades thanks to the advocacy and restoration work of Martin Scorsese.
Yet their films do seem somehow distinctly British. They focus predominantly on British people, British places, British customs, and supposedly British values. With the fond irony that makes many characters slightly ridiculous but few seriously bad, they do so in a British way. In A Matter of Life and Death (1946), this focus is literal: the genial village doctor observes his (charming, thus British) village through the (remarkable-if-eccentric, thus British) lens of a camera obscura.
The locations are explicitly, meaningfully British: deepest rural Shropshire in Gone to Earth (1950); the quirky Kent village in A Canterbury Tale (1944), with its medieval and mystical echoes; the Celtic music and magic of I Know Where I’m Going!; the gentleman’s club and officer’s mess of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. The exoticisms and excesses of the Himalayas in Black Narcissus (1947) are contrasted with fishing and loving back home (albeit in Ireland). The study-libraries of the doctor in A Matter of Life and Death and the squire in A Canterbury Tale are detailed reflections of character. Topography is important: a cliff features as prominently in The Spy in Black (1939) as in Black Narcissus. Powell plays fast and loose with Scottish islands in I Know Where I’m Going! and his earlier The Edge of the World (1937), but the sense of specific places with their specific cultures and geographies is significant; Corryvreckan, in the former, is a real as much as an emotional whirlpool.
A viewer must know Britain, and feel some fondness for it, for Blimp to even make much sense. The central character is from a popular British newspaper strip cartoon, here elaborated and explored over the half-century from the Boer War to the Second World War. He displays his virtues as a representative of Britishness, in contrast or conflict with Germans/others. As he veers between admirable and merely foolish, he is clearly a Briton doing so. The New Yorker commented that the film “may be the greatest English film ever made, not least because it looks so closely at the incurable condition of being English.” A foreign viewer might find the film interesting or even enjoyable; a viewer has to be British to care.
A Matter of Life and Death was supposed to be a celebration of the bond between Britain and America, but it, too, was both more than that and rather less. However charming and charmable Kim Hunter—and however glorious Raymond Massey’s velvet growl—the Brits get much more of a showing. Even in the background—from Robert Coote’s bristle-moustached chortler to Richard Attenborough’s awed clerk—they are more richly painted. The most powerful scene in the film is a celebration of British character: David Niven trying to nurse his doomed aircraft home, Hunter on the radio trying to keep him going, stiff upper lips wobbling in audiences everywhere. To distract from his impending death, the pilot introduces himself, by definition a representative of his people: he’s likeable, moderate, a little quirky.
Gone to Earth is ripe melodrama in a sumptuous portrait of English landscape and rural life. I Know Where I’m Going! is a pleasant romance immersed in and fired by Scottish island culture. A Canterbury Tale celebrates English regional folklore as something worth fighting for. The energy in The Elusive Pimpernel (1950) comes from a distinctly British sporting jollity masking a distinctly British sense of fair play, and the drama comes from a distinctly British over-subtle honor. Black Narcissus is a working out, in a Himalayan monastery, of British/Irish emotions. The fact that most of the ‘sub-tropical’ exteriors were shot in a garden in Sussex, and that some of the most distinctly foreign characters were (over-)played by British character actors, only reinforces a certain homeliness. David Niven’s reaction in A Matter of Life and Death, arriving in what he thinks is heaven and bumping into a labrador—“Oh, I always hoped there would be dogs”—may be the most British line in all cinema.
* * *
They’re an unhappy people … They want to believe that somebody’s their friend, and that’s the whole trick.
(One of Our Aircraft is Missing)
Yet each time Powell and Pressburger tried to produce a patriotic piece, they defied expectations—and even the government.
With impending peace weakening the imposed bonds of war, the Ministry of Information asked the Archers: “Can’t you two fellows think up a good idea to improve Anglo-American relations?” Formally, A Matter of Life and Death does what it’s supposed to, providing a love affair, a heavenly debate about identities and compatibility, and a courteous nod to America’s diversity and opportunity in the shape of the new-look jury who are brought in. But for a British audience concerned about over-paid, over-sexed and over-here American servicemen, and for an American audience concerned about whether the British were out-of-touch imperialist lightweights, Powell and Pressburger’s metaphysical exploration of love, death, and identity—complete with an effete French revolutionary herald, a fantastical escalator to heaven, and a lengthy quote from Sir Walter Scott—was an eccentric approach, to say the least. The crux and climax is not whether love transcends Britishness, but whether it transcends death. The film is also about mental trauma and the challenge for an individual and a society trying to emerge from war.
The Archers had been no less defiant of convention in wartime. 49th Parallel (1941) is an effective celebration of diverse British Empire subjects thwarting the enemy while encouraging America to come off the fence, but it was bold to focus the narrative on a group of Germans. However nasty, they are humanized—and that was rare at the time. 1939’s The Spy In Black likewise shows how hard Powell and Pressburger found it to paint anything as simply black or white (even without Technicolor). There are good guys to cheer, as they fight to save the British fleet from destruction by Nazi saboteurs, but the film just can’t resist the charm of Conrad Veidt as he flirts with Valerie Hobson. Posterity remembers Veidt in one of his simplest sinister Hun roles, Major Strasser in Casablanca. But the real Veidt—like so many film fugitives from 1930s Germany—was the opposite of his public image. Wooed by Goebbels as a prominent German actor, he falsely declared himself Jewish in solidarity with his Jewish wife and thus guaranteed his exile; once in Hollywood he gave a significant chunk of his British savings to help war orphans. Some of that roguish virtue comes through in The Spy in Black. Then again, relative moral simplicity is one of the reasons Casablanca won the Oscar for Best Picture, and none of the Archers’ films ever did.
Peacetime allowed them to broaden their horizons, but their perspectives were as distinctive and challenging as ever. Indeed, the exception that proves the rule is The Elusive Pimpernel: a relatively conventional run-through of the heroics, it’s perhaps the Archers’ dullest and least successful film. Black Narcissus (1947), by contrast, is one of their and cinema’s greatest—and it’s an exploration of weakness. It celebrates almost nothing—except perhaps the handsomeness of British actors, actresses, and production design. It depicts the failures of a colonial mentality; the nuns trudging home at the end were only the vanguard of Britain’s departure from India in 1947. (The film’s US release was just the day before partition.) The hero in The Small Back Room (1949) is a self-pitying drunk. The Red Shoes (1948) is a brilliant and lavish film and, remarkably for a psychological drama with a 17-minute ballet sequence, it would in time become the first British film to take $5 million and the most successful 1948 release in the US. But—compared say to the runners-up, John Wayne’s Red River and Bob Hope’s The Paleface—it’s hardly a conventional crowd-pleaser.
For eighty years, crowds and critics have been debating The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Whatever it is, it’s surely not the satire on old foolishness which drove the original cartoon, nor the validation of Blimpishness which made the Government consider blocking it (not least through official control of the import of precious Technicolor film stock). Nor is it quite the injunction to “pull our socks up” intended by Powell. The ‘Blimp’ character, General Wynne-Candy (Roger Livesey), is loveable and even admirable—but neither in the way he hopes. He’s also emotionally inarticulate and foolish and out of touch. (Having himself done heroics in the Boer War, commanded in the trenches in the First World War and risen to prominence in the Second, perhaps Winston Churchill felt that he personally was being satirized in the parallel career of the stout, whiffling, simple-hearted hero. But those qualities were what made people fond of the film’s general, and perhaps fond of Churchill as well.)
Blimp is a foil for the changing ideal of Britishness represented by the Deborah Kerr characters, but the film must nod to the weirdness of his obsession with her. He’s a foil for the sharper modern tactics of the young British Lieutenant who confronts him, but the film strays into uncomfortable territory here, with a South African officer—British Empire but not British, goodness no—who mistreats German prisoners to get information. He’s a foil for the greater strategic and emotional awareness of his friend Theo, but this, above all, provoked newspaper outrage. How could the most pleasant, wise, and articulate character be a German? How could one of the strongest moments in this British film be a German lecturing to a Briton about the essence of British decency and freedom as well as the appeal of the British landscape?
Confronted by an angry Churchill after an early screening, Anton Walbrook (Theo) supposedly told him: “No people in the world other than the English would have had the courage, in the midst of war, to tell the people such unvarnished truth.” Unfortunately it wasn’t a truth that the English necessarily recognized or wanted.
* * *
The agent at Mopu is an Englishman. He seems a difficult man. You won’t get much help from him.
(Black Narcissus)
In his autobiography, Powell wrote that the Archers were holding up a mirror for the audience, but “they have not understood the image.”
The distinctive perspective of Emeric Pressburger—wandering Hungarian, fugitive from Hitler’s Europe—is easily grasped. Although his background was not unusual for filmmakers in Britain and Hollywood in his generation, he was clearly an outsider. (As a suspicious foreigner in wartime, he wasn’t allowed into the Canterbury Tale location shoot because the county of Kent was a restricted zone.) Britain and Britishness are not things he merely knows and celebrates in his screenplays. Rather, they are phenomena he is still exploring—trying to puzzle out. The obvious analogue is Theo in Blimp (his favorite among their films): a man who finds sanctuary and kindness and much to admire in Britain, but who sees the British more dispassionately and astutely than they do themselves.
Meanwhile, much of Michael Powell’s apparent Britishness—the dapper energy, the cheerful philandering, the elegant irreverence—was superficial. His affection for his homeland was never so simple. As a director, he enjoyed the country’s cinematic aspects: wild islands and ominous cliffs, ruined castles and splendid dining rooms, Scottish ceilidhs and Turkish baths. As his autobiography shows, however, he celebrated not some abstract official version of national treasures but rather the nuances and customs and rhythms of very particular places. He had learned filmmaking from Americans in the South of France: like the Scarlet Pimpernel, he flourished across the channel. His inspirations and his first experiences were international and cosmopolitan. As a professional, he saw Britain and British filmmaking from the outside before working inside.
In A Matter of Life and Death, Peter and the doctor are pleasant, likeable Englishmen, but they’re exposed to a critical examination which in effect kills one and threatens to kill the other. However mighty your Britishness, there is always mortality; the film re-validates the power of one life in a world emerging from a war when lives had been written off by the million. There’s a striking parallel with the near-contemporary American classic It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) with its archetypal small community, heavenly herald, and deconstruction of the value of one existence. In the British film’s celestial debate, the American advocate presents Britain as an imperialistic and foolish power, and the British advocate doesn’t actually counter this; the best he can come up with is that love is love.
The examination in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp lasts over four decades and cuts deeper. It takes a character who is apparently moral, benign, and even harmless, exposes him to the real world, and unpicks his values. Here, as elsewhere, the Archers show the negatives that Britain is capable of: the hypocrisy, the bluster, the insularity.
Small community life in Britain comes in for very diverse and equally harsh scrutiny in A Canterbury Tale, Gone to Earth, and The Edge of the World. The myths and clichés are supplanted by the brutalities and the weirdnesses, the extremes and the excesses. I Know Where I’m Going! dismantles Britain further, examining Englishness relative to Scotland. The islanders are charmingly simple and folkloric—but they are also living more deeply, truly, and wisely than the English. The English heroine is impressive and engaging, but she has been deluding herself. Her English prospective husband is out of touch with the society on which he has imposed himself. To make the most of Britain—to inhabit Britishness most fully—the go-getting English girl must learn some Scottishness. In the course of their films, the Archers subject Britishness to the gaze of the Frenchman (A Matter of Life and Death), the American (ditto), the German (Blimp, The Spy in Black), the South African (Blimp), and the Russian (The Red Shoes)—and to the spiritual and cultural force of South Asia (Black Narcissus). In each case, Britain and Britishness (and sometimes more particularly England and Englishness) are found to be imperfect, fallible, even ridiculous. The loftier the pretension, the harder the fall (Black Narcissus).
Yet in the harsh light of the Archers’ scrutiny, more viable and enduring qualities are to be found. 49th Parallel, The Spy in Black, and Blimp show that humanizing and amplifying foreigners doesn’t make Britain any less worthy or resilient. The drunk in The Small Back Room (1949) comes to terms with his weaknesses and pulls himself together enough to do his job and save his relationship. Sister Clodagh in Black Narcissus learns humility; the world of the flesh is inescapable, but there is still value in looking to the heavens. Wendy Hiller’s Joan may not really Know Where She’s Going, but she gets somewhere, and it’s a place with deeper, firmer foundations. The Canterbury pilgrims have to go off to war, but they do so with a renewed hint of the sacred that runs through and transcends the pettiness and brutality of their world. The idealism of Colonel Blimp is foolish and futile, but he reveals other virtues which provoke admiration and affection. When it’s a matter of life and death, the British may be mortal, but their individual lives are still worthy and to be treasured.
* * *
Don’t forget, a great impression of simplicity can only be achieved by great agony of body and spirit.
(The Red Shoes)
A prominent and successful director for three decades, Powell fell off a career cliff in 1960. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp may have cost him a knighthood; Peeping Tom (1960) ruined him. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this psychological drama of fetishism and voyeurism and violence—a film arguably more unsettling and serious than Psycho in the same year, by Powell’s contemporary Hitchcock—is not what British enthusiasts think of when they celebrate his films. But it was typical of his restless, squint-eyed rummaging through what Britishness and human-ness could be. The harmless eccentric scrutiny of the village doctor with his camera obscura had become the lethal distorted gaze of the psychopath with the camera-as-weapon. Viewers who expected Powell to sustain 1940s sentimentalities in the 1960s, rather than to keep in step with the times and the neuroses, did not know him. It is impossible to reconcile Peeping Tom with an image of Powell as the champion of a cosy, inoffensive olde Englande, Powell–as–Blimp. But the film is entirely consistent with—perhaps even the key to—Powell the perpetual illuminator of dark corners.
If that Powell film from a few years after the partnership offers one lens for viewing their work, a film from a few years before it offers another. After two dozen films which he made because a producer or studio head told him to, his 1937 The Edge of the World was Powell’s first truly personal project. He had been struck by the story of the evacuation of St Kilda years before, kept the news clipping. It’s an early outing for his enduring enthusiasm for islands, cliffs, folklore, and intrepid location shoots. Above all, the clue is in the name. The Edge of the World adapts a remarkable and real story about a remarkable and real place. But it speaks to much wider ideas of culture-as-identity, of culture-under-threat, of the natural impulse towards a better-if-uncertain future in contest with the instinct to preserve a known-but-unsustainable past.
The title would have done as well for several of the Archers’ films. So much of their work was about borderlands: the physical rawness of the edge of the world, and the emotional turbulence of those who cross the bounds. 49th Parallel has a border for a title as well as a goal, and was meant to strengthen it. Blimp—basically an elaborate German exchange programme—depicts two men who each cross into the heart of the enemy camp. Joan in I Know Where I’m Going goes to the edge of the British Isles and finds herself in an unstable borderland of nature, culture and affection. (In A Canterbury Tale, Alison the Land Girl from London is mystified enough by the dialogue of Kent; Scots Gaelic would be otherworldly.) Gone to Earth is fascinating in this context: Shropshire may be near the geographic heart of the British Isles, but the near-feral girl and the near-devil squire are explorations on the wild margins of British society. Black Narcissus is a tussle between Britain and India, practical and spiritual, fought on the edge of an emotional as well as physical cliff. And A Matter of Life and Death explores the greatest borderland of all.
* * *
Am I very different?
Yes. You’re much nicer. You’re human.
(Black Narcissus)
In the framing sequence for The Edge of the World, Michael Powell himself plays the elegant yachtsman, his only appearance in his own films; his wife Frankie plays his companion. The director represents our natural curiosity at this remarkable place, and in making the film he was realizing a dream born of his own curiosity about what it represented. The Archers were stress-testing Britishness: taking it to the edge and seeing how it performed. In doing so, they enabled both a more honest appreciation and a deeper fondness. If you can know all this of Britain, they say, you can love it the more truly.
There is no romance in St Kilda. The journey is no long-legged short-shorted cruise, but a purgatory of sea-sickness. The settlement there is what it always was: no abandoned Eden, but a cluster of simple stone shacks huddling among the cliffs, where the population risked their lives every day to catch and slaughter seabirds for food. Powell was not able to film there, so had to go to Foula instead; The Edge of the World is widely understood to be about St Kilda, but in itself it doesn’t even claim to be. The islanders were not noble savages dragged into the 20th century by anti-romantic bureaucrats, but a shrinking and aging colony whose children were desperate for the new century and who, in the end, were begging to be evacuated. (The only recent inhabitants have been wildlife specialists and defense contractors; the fun Powell and Pressburger might have had with them!) They may have left an open Bible and a handful of oats in each abandoned home when they departed forever; they certainly drowned all their dogs in the harbor.
The seaman’s tale is a sobering one. The visitor who spends the regulation couple of hours exploring the ruins of St Kilda escapes not with romance kindled, but with the uncanny sensation of having looked over into the abyss. The few pilgrims on the boat gaze back the way they have come, clinging to faith that there is a warm homecoming over the horizon. Behind them, mighty and impassive, the mountain falls into the sea.